Robofootball: Doublespin

It was a small lake and the moon’s reflection appeared as if from some cheap cardboard box puzzle from untold decades ago, of which thousands decorated nearly every senior citizen community room in countless generic looking buildings, unless one had money of course to stay in a more elaborate setting in those golden years. Like the slick mob boss Dano Verlucci was fond of saying, money talks, opens doors, and gets you what you want in the long run. Rarely, and even miraculously, did a puzzle piece ever go missing from the more typical old folks home. Those pesky seniors, likely from the experience and caution that comes with age, were a responsible lot, and seldom ever dropped a piece let alone lose one. Those dusty puzzles stood the test of time, put together and taken apart repeatedly, usually outliving the residents who built them.

The lake cast a puzzle scene where the trees reflected into the water, the little boats and decks too; nevertheless, the puzzle simply didn’t do it justice. This particular lake scene puzzle was also one of the old ones, nearly as old as the residents who built it, over and over again, countless times. Fading, dust, and dry fingerprints of age made a generic scene even more so, especially with the limits imposed by nondigital photography from decades past. The lake however was gorgeous within the eyesight of the direct sensory beholder, glistening with a soft ripple here and there as the breeze picked up on occasion. The lake perhaps constituted 16 acres which may have been generous by half an acre or so given the recent drought. A couple of inches of rain would certainly perk it up, and once in a blue moon, it might even exceed that 16.

Unlike the daytime puzzle, the moon, eerily in places, shimmered above the trees across one side of the lake, dropping them in turn upside down in an odd or weird flickering refraction as the wind gusted even so slightly, on and off, more off than on, whistling with a sound that made the leaves nervous. The moon was bright with spots of gray visible to the naked eye, endless craters from asteroids past and present, primarily from the former, though a stray new one, every hundred years or so, stopped on by to make a noticeable dent, at least to those who studied such things. They were little more than a shot in the dark, but every few tens of thousands of years, a big one would hit, leaving a crater large enough to be studied with a telescope with tired human eyes behind it. When it happened on Earth, some unlucky predisposed evolutionary weakling went extinct, sometimes many more than just one vulnerable species.

“It’s too early yet for the stars,” said Jess.

“I know,” said Carly.

“Gnarly Carly,” he teased and laughed.

She punched him and struck his hardened bicep, “You know I hate that you bastard”. She said in a fairly neutral tone, giving him the chance to make amends before she really got pissed off.

“Sorry,” he said sheepishly.

“Okay,” she let him slide, he did display a little remorse; after all, he was fairly shy, quiet, and respectful, even though he had the potential of becoming a big time annoying jock in high school.

“The moon is out.” Jess thought about adding another ‘gnarly’ comment but thought better. At 16, girls were great to look at, and that way of thinking had been going on for him for a solid two years now. Plus the girls were indeed years ahead in maturity and he had to be careful not to tease or joke as much as he did around his male friends. He was learning to adjust like a good quarterback recognizing patterns in the defense. Love was a tougher game, and a man or woman too might spend their life time competing for it and never win.

“I see that,” she gazed upward and outward.

Jess paused for an almost uncomfortable length of time as Carly giggled. He was trying to think of something to say that didn’t sound too corny. He was on foreign ground in terms of tentativeness; it wasn’t like deciding whether to throw it away or tuck it in and run.

“Cat got your tongue?” She inquired.

“Uh, no,” answered Jess, grateful that she had said something. “Well, maybe a little,” he confessed. His mom had always said that in times of trouble or confusion, the basic truth was probably best. Then again, he didn’t know at the time that moms were sneaky and drilled their kids like hard-nosed detectives.

“What’s the matter? Can’t the superstar high school quarterback and all around jock make some sort of smooth move? There’s no one else here you know.”

Jess was driving his dad’s old Chevy pickup, old to them though it was an early 21st century model equipped with a fuel injected 5.3 liter 300 horsepower V8. It maybe achieved 20 mpg on the highway at its absolute best, more like 15-16 overall for the limited driving Jess did. They were parked at one of the numerous small lakes that were part of Harrison, Michigan, one where there was a public access point, boat launch, and perhaps room for 4 or 5 normal cars to park. At present, there’s was the only vehicle as Carly eagerly pointed out.

“I was just thinking,” he replied somewhat tentatively and shyly.

“Now there’s a stretch,” she couldn’t help but needle as she giggled again.

“We’re not all as smart as you, ya know.”

“True, but I’m still a couple of tenths of percentage points behind Mindie Larson for valedictorian.”

“Don’t you get all A’s?”

“Well yeah, but they give a few extra tenths for honors courses, and she’s taken one more of them than me, the one “SHE” got into when there was apparently no room for me,” Carly added disgustedly.

“We just became juniors, there’s almost 2 full years yet.”

“Yes there is,” she replied. “But let’s talk about other things.”

“Like what?”

“There’s literature, history, and of course your geometry test coming up.”

“Okay,” he hesitated. “I’m having trouble with all that triangle junk, there’s so many of them.”

She laughed out loud, a nice gregarious laugh, Jess laughed too; she looked good, happy, with big bright piercing green eyes. “I was joking dear, but now that you brought it up, do tell me the different names if you can.” Carly was wondering what a girl had to do to get a kiss, if triangles were the answer, then she’d go along.

“Well, there’s equilateral and I can get that one you know, all the sides are the same length and the angles are all 60 degrees”.

“Go on,” oh lord, she was still thinking of scoring that kiss or two, but it’s early, she thought, and this is fun too. Despite excelling at quarterback, Jess played 3rd base on the baseball team, and started at forward on the varsity basketball team, though he could play center and guard too if needed. He was rather versatile, but Harrison was an old Class C smaller school when the classes ranged from A to D, but now Division 6 when they revised them into 9 divisions based on student population. H had good size at 6’2” and would grow another inch or so the following year. He was a bit lean and not filled out yet, but obviously had a fine, strong arm. His football coach wanted him to add weight as 170 pounds made him look a little on the thin side. He was great around guys, funny, outgoing, and a natural leader on the field, but when it came to girls, he lacked a little confidence, and basically came across as adorably shy.

“Then there’s acute, right, obtuse, isosceles, regular, and then all that similar and congruent stuff like side-angle-side and you’ve got to throw it into proofs and such.”

“Regular is really the same as equilateral when it comes to triangles,” she commented, easily slipping into academic discourse. “The term really goes with any figure that has equal sides and equivalent angle measures like a square or hexagon or octagon.”

“Like a stop sign?”

“Sure, I think it is regular.”

“I didn’t know that about ‘regular’,” he said skeptically.

She slid a little closer, “We can do a little tutoring tomorrow, look, a few stars are just coming out,” she pointed.

“That yellow one is pretty bright.”

She laughed again and he noticed that her teeth were quite perfect, behind full healthy lips too.

“What’s so funny?”

“That’s actually Saturn”.

“Really? I didn’t think you could see the planets without a telescope or something.”

“Most you can’t, but at certain times and angles, they reflect quite nicely from our sun, not unlike the moon, only a bit further away, but not nearly as far as the stars.”

“I didn’t know that either.” Jess wasn’t exactly dumb, but he worked hard and struggled into a “B” average but had been raising it a little with Carly’s help.

“Dumb jock,” she said with a big smile.

“I know, Gnarly Carly!”

She hit him again but they both laughed. Soon “Dumb Jock” would become a pet name for him while “Gnarly Carly” was a bit more off limits. She edged a little closer, inch by inch.

“Aw hell,” she said as she grabbed the back of his neck, slammed her mouth a little more direct and forceful than intended, and then kissed him awkwardly as their teeth lightly collided with one another.

“Oops, sorry,” she said sheepishly as she retreated back a foot or so. It was only the second time they had kissed, counting a couple of quickies in the pickup at Friday’s lunch hour the previous day at school.

“Carly, I’m sor…,” but he didn’t have time to finish as she tried again, this time avoiding his teeth carefully, and hanging on a little longer. She withdrew again a few inches to judge his reaction. He hadn’t quite engaged as much as she did.

“Car….” God she tasted good, spearmint gum.

She really cut him off this time and locked on, moving up and down and roundabout some. He finally caught on, matching the rhythm like a well planned roll out option.

“Better?” She said after a full 30 seconds to withdraw for air.

He grinned sheepishly without saying a word but nodded a resounding yes.

“Want to try again?” She inquired.

“I guess.”

“What do you mean you guess? It’s a yes or no question and there’s only one right answer,” she tutored.

“Okay”.

“Okay what?”

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes, let’s do it again.”

“Put your arm around me first,” Carly replied. She was slightly conflicted too, confident when it came to the world of academics, but not so much with relationships. Then again, what does a 16 year old know? The experience of true love balanced by heart ache was not yet in her repertoire, nor Jess’s. On the one hand, she had to lead him a bit like a kitten on its first trip to the new litter box, but on the other, his shyness was one of his endearing qualities, perhaps the main reason why he wasn’t hanging out with the bimbo cheerleaders like his sports playing friends. That damn blonde Amanda Simpson was always flirting shamelessly with him.

“Okay,” he did so a little awkwardly, but it worked fine as she nestled in more snugly. He even took a little initiative on the next one as he had to bend down a bit to reach her. They made somewhat of an off pair in addition to their nearly foot difference in height. She was barely 5’3” tall with dark blonde or light brunette hair that ran just past the shoulder. Her hair could be pulled back and managed with one thick single ponytail. She wore glasses with fairly small fashionable rectangular lenses and gold rims that gave her a bit of an inquisitive scholarly look. Despite a somewhat young curvy Madonna-like body with ample breasts and hips, she was thin in the face and narrow in the shoulders with prominent collar bones and cheekbones to match if such a combination could really go together. Her chin was a little pointy, almost elfin-like, and she had intense emerald green eyes. She was a little on the pale, pasty side, but not quite like a redhead; she would tan well with some proper sunscreen mixed with a careful conservative strategy to limit her direct exposure. She had peeled enough like plastic wrap as a young child to know better now.

“Jess” not “Jessie” as most assumed the latter to be his full name, but his birth certificate only counted 4 letters for the first name, and it was not an oversight. His mom wanted it that way despite a weak protest from his dad. He was tall, dark-skinned, dark-complexioned, dark hair that was almost black. He may have passed for Italian or even Spanish, but his near blue hazel eyes gave away some further mixed northern European heritage, perhaps a drop or two of Scandinavian blood. To Carly and most of the girls in the school, he was quite handsome, sort of that stereotypical All-American look, only a little on the darker side instead of one of those light California sunshine boys.

The two were just a little odd as a budding couple in that they bucked the trend of jock and honor student; two opposing forces like the proverbial unmovable object and the unstoppable force, maybe not quite like oil and water since they were compatible humans, but still, the classes were not stereotypically together in the least. Neither was much beyond their 16th birthday, in fact, they had been born a day apart back in 2001, his birthday on July 14th, and hers on the 15th. She had just been approved for car dates by her parents with quite a few limitations. Football had started already as practice in the summer had been intense in preparation for the fall season. As a junior, Jess had won the role of starting quarterback, so in a sense, he had not quite become the big man on campus yet, as he was unproven, and the first game was not until the following Friday. In short, they were only a few weeks into their junior year, but starting quarterbacks at any level seemed to garner a good deal of attention. The high school quarterback was ordinarily at the pinnacle of popularity at that level, but Jess was different, shy, soft spoken, and even a degree of uncommon humbleness for a 16 year old boy. If he had had a sibling or brother for that matter, he would have been the good son.

“Look, there’s more stars,” Carly pointed out as she came up for some much needed air. If she was going to pass out, this wasn’t such a bad way to go, a cute boy & a pickup parked at a lake looking at the stars. It wouldn’t be long before these were somewhat distant faded memories, but she could not know that now.

“Are you sure they’re not planets?”

“Yes. You can even make out constellations now.”

“Like what?”

“The Big Dipper’s an easy one, see?” She pointed and outlined it for him with her finger. He noticed the pink polished fingernail before looking upward.

“Yeah, I think I know that one”.

“Everybody does, but if you follow the 2 points at the end of the dipper, project them forward into a line, the imaginary line leads to the North Star.”

“Okay, we are facing north.”

“Yes, it’s faint, it’s there,” she pointed again with her pretty pink finger.

“Okay, I think I’ve got it,” as he pointed correctly too.

“What’s neat about the North Star, aside from the fact that it looks like everything else revolves around it; in other words, it appears fixed in the sky in the same position from our time and perspective, is that it is the first star in the handle of the Little Dipper.”

“I don’t see it. I mean I see the North Star but not the Little Dipper”.

“Yes, most of the stars are not visible yet, but I can make out the “W” or crown of Cassiopeia, and the Great Square of Pegasus too. She pointed and then forced his head around and about like an irritated barber. “Now Jess, if you follow the arc of the Big Dipper’s handle, you get to Arcturus, see? It looks like a giant kite.”

“You sure know a lot of stuff”.

“One of us has to,” she giggled. “Here, let me show you something else”. This time she kissed him and tentatively wiggled her tongue a bit in search of his. She wasn’t really an expert, but she had snuck a few of her mother’s hidden romance novels under her bed from time to time, and was indeed a voracious reader. These novels were not the usual fare or the ones her mother arbitrarily placed on a bookshelf, but more along the lines of hot steamy sexual thrillers, the raciest of the raciest. Her mother had stuffed a couple of shoe boxes full, far back into the recesses of her closet, but Carly had found them on an illegal premature Christmas present hunt a couple of years back.

Jess on the other hand was still shy, and he did not read such books. Then again, there were the Playboys and Penthouses that his dad had long crated away in the basement that every blue dog boy is destined to find; but several decades into the computer age, the old magazines could not rival the sheer volume of porn on the Internet. What started as kilobytes and megabytes gradually evolved into terabytes and even petabytes. It had also been many decades in the Western world, that boys were the aggressors in relationships and girls were firmly coached into chanting “no” repeatedly. To cop a sports analogy, Carly wasn’t about to go beyond first base anyhow, but maybe 2nd was only a date or two away.

“We’re nearly an hour after curfew you know,” said Carly as she came up for air again, breathing a little more heavily this time. “And I don’t think we qualify as an authorized activity!” She giggled. Michigan law required that 16 years olds not operate a motor vehicle between 10:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. unless it was job-related, an emergency, with a licensed driver 21 years of age or older that was sanctioned by one’s parents, or driving to and from an authorized activity. Authorized activities included school events like clubs and sports, other sports too not necessarily school-related, vocational training at a college or government agency, or a religious event such as church attendance or a retreat.

Jess actually held a special farm permit from the age of 14, allowing him to drive a tractor on rural roads within a couple of miles of the farm. Both his dad and Uncle Larry shared 80 acres of crop land that they inherited from Jess’s grandparents, 40 each. They once rotated soy beans and corn, but now, with Jess so involved in school sports, his father had simply planted it over with alfalfa and was just going to run the baler through it a couple of times a year. Jess had less and less time to help out on the farm except for help with the summer baling of hay.

“Yeah, your mom wants you back home around 11 doesn’t she?”

“Yes, we had better get going Jess,” she brushed his lips lightly one final time at the lake, and she would squeeze one more quick one when he dropped her off at her home.

“Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.”

President Theodore Roosevelt